Ok, we are starting a new series today as we walk through Paul’s first letter to Timothy. People think about this letter and they usually immediately think about things like the qualifications for church officers and the roles of men and women in the church and, while those things are certainly there, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees here. Paul is writing to the very young Timothy to give him advice about how to best pastor the church in Ephesus. He’s a young pastor and Paul is giving him advice on how God has designed the church to best operate, not just as an institution, but as a family. As the household of God. If there is one verse to keep in mind when you read 1 Timothy, I suggest 3:15 14 I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things to you so that, 15 if  I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God - 1 Tim 3:15

I once had a conversation with a very well-known pastor who began to pastor his church at the age of 28 and I asked him if he could go back and give his 28 year old self some piece of advice, what would it be? He said it didn’t matter at all because his 28 year old self wouldn’t listen to a thing he had to say. And while I appreciate the honesty of that answer, Timothy seems to be the exact opposite. Timothy seems to be young and maybe in over his head in some regards, but eager to listen to any advice Paul has. 

If there is one book of the Bible, that answers the question: What is the church supposed to look like? It’s 1 Timothy. The 20th century was the highwater mark in the US for church attendance. But, it was a low water mark in many ways for how we built churches. We built churches around entertainment, we built churches around politics, we built churches around race, we built churches around famous pastors (which should be an oxymoron), we built churches around new prophetic words that God apparently decided to wait 2000 years to give, and we built churches around certain musical styles. None of those are remotely mentioned by Paul when he is giving Timothy this advice. So we should all really want to listen. 

All of us have reasons to care about this letter. For one, it’s in the Bible, so there’s that. For those of you who are leaders in this church, you should care that we are listening to and leaning into the design God has given the church. For those of you who are members here, you should care that your church cares about and is trying to emulate the design God has for the church. We are in a season of nominating elders and deacons and this letter should greatly inform who you nominate. If you are raising children in this church, this greatly affects their most formative years. And if you attend OGC, but aren’t a member, you’re probably looking for a church family and this letter tells you what you should be looking for. So this affects all of us. 

And in the first seven verses, Paul tells Timothy to be attentive to the message they embrace.  Paul could have started this letter in many other ways. He could start with how the church is organized. He could start with what we do in church. He could start, I suppose, with musical style if he wanted. But Paul starts by talking about the message of the gospel. And Paul tells us that we need to 1) remember the source of the gospel message, 2) we need to protect the content of the gospel message, and 3) we need to strive for the goal of the gospel message. 

1. Remember the source of the gospel message

The source of the message is not only the Apostle Paul, but God himself. The word ‘apostle’ means sent one and the specific way this word is used in the early church in terms of the office of Apostle is specifically talking about 13 men. Men who heard directly from Jesus and were called to this office for life by him. So you have the twelve disciples with Matthias replacing Judas. And then you have Paul. This is why we aren’t nominating apostles in addition to elders and deacons. We don’t get to do that. There were 13 and the office died with them. This is why the New Testament doesn't anywhere give us any instructions for selecting new Apostles, but only elders and deacons. 

In the first line, Paul makes it clear that he is an Apostle ‘by command’ of Jesus. So, the message comes from God himself and the message is the gospel of Jesus Christ and its supporting doctrines. So the message of the gospel and the design and purpose of the church weren’t created hundreds of years later, they didn’t develop over a game of telephone, and they weren’t voted on in some council. They were given to us by God, through the Apostles and the church is never going to evolve past this design. This design is timeless. A church might change its style of music. It might change the building it meets in. It will change languages as it spreads around the world, but the core message of the gospel and the design and purpose of the church does not change.

One of the brilliant things God has done for the church is to lock the meaning of these words into an historic context that we need to pay attention to to be able to know what is timely and what is timeless. What is descriptive and what is prescriptive. If we don’t pay attention to the context of the message we are given, we can hear the right words and do the wrong thing with it. Years ago, we were at the pool and an unnamed boy of mine came up to me and said he needed to go to the bathroom. I was hanging out with my brother-in-law and I didn’t want to stop and take this kid to the bathroom, so in a moment of top notch parenting, I told this kid to just go pee in the pool. Well, about two minutes later, I heard screaming and looked and this kid had walked to the edge of the pool pulled his pants down and was peeing in the pool. This poor kid looked horrifically at everyone and said, “What? My dad told me to pee in the pool.” This kid heard the right words, but did something very different than I intended with them. The good news for us, though, is that God isn’t lazy like me and he has given us these words for our flourishing and we need to understand them in their correct context.

In the 20th century, the American church did a good job on the truth of the gospel and the Bible, but often did not do a good job on the goodness and beauty of the gospel. You can see the truth being defended in our sermons, evangelistic presentations, and apologetic methods, but Jesus’ vision for our flourishing sometimes got lost. But, because the source of this message is God, who is himself love, we can know that what we read here is for our good. If you believe that God the Son, Jesus, would die on a cross for your sins, then why would we doubt that the message he’s given the church would instruct us toward anything, but our good? 

This is the reason we stand when God’s word is read. We recognize that it comes from God and we stand to honor him. We are not here primarily to hear the mere words of a man, whether that be myself, Robert, Clark, or anyone else who preaches here. We are here to sing, pray, and hear the word of God. It’s his word because he is the source. 

1. Protect the content of the gospel message

As soon as Paul moves from the introduction to the content of his letter in verse three, he tells Timothy to protect the content of the gospel message given to them. The church in Ephesus had some problems. There were people outside the church teaching contrary messages, but there were also people inside the church corrupting the message. It seems like there were even elders in the church going astray. So, Paul starts by telling them and us that we can’t add to the message we have been given. It seems from verse four that there were teachers who were devoting themselves to myths and endless genealogies. Most likely, this means that people were taking extra-biblical writings like genealogies and adding stories into Scripture that created additional things the church should be doing. They were adding to the demands of the law. 

We’ll see in chapter four that some of these teachers were forbidding people to marry, some were prohibiting the eating of certain foods that we have the freedom to eat, and in so doing, they were adding more requirements to the faith and taking away from the core of the gospel message. This is what Paul is talking about when he says,  6 Certain persons, by oswerving from these, have wandered away into pvain discussion, 7 desiring to be teachers of the law, qwithout understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions. - 1 Tim 1:6,7

Our job in the church is to make sure that what we teach is good, but that’s not all. We are to call out bad teaching. It’s not enough to just teach what is true if we don’t call out what is bad. With my kids, we not only try to teach what is good, but we often point out things we see at school and in the neighborhood that are contrary to what we want for them. 

Now, certain people by natural disposition find it easier to teach what is good and harder to say what is wrong. Others find it easier to call out what is wrong rather than teach what is good. This is one of the many reasons it’s good that a church is not led by one person, but a plurality of elders. For me, I more naturally want to teach what is good. But there are often cases where erroneous doctrine is being taught in the church and we need to address it. 99% of the time, that is going to happen in private conversations. They are never fun and, sadly, can sometimes result in that person leaving the church, but they have to happen to protect the content of the gospel message. 

Paul says that these false doctrines, myths, and endless genealogies, they all promote speculation rather than the stewardship of the gospel message we have been given. Speculation rather than stewardship. What’s the difference? Why is speculation so bad? Speculation is focusing on what we don’t know or can’t know. Speculation is taking some theological or philosophical idea that is at best unknown or at worst flat out wrong and giving your heart and passion more to that than what we do know is absolutely true about the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

Even if whatever it is that we are speculating about is not flat out wrong, it can hijack our focus on what we do know to be true. Have you ever been around someone who mainly wants to convince you of their interpretation of end times? How it’s going to go. When it’s going to happen. What signs we see right now that indicate the end is near. Who the antichrist is. There is a point when that goes from stewardship to speculation. And for what it’s worth, if you need a big chart to understand the book of Revelation, I would argue that you misunderstand Revelation, but we can circle back to that one day. 

When someone becomes absolutely consumed and hyper focused on something like end times, they begin to live increasingly in a world of speculation and decreasingly stewarding the gospel we have been given. They begin to live in their own self-righteous pursuit of what we do not know and less in the humility of the gospel that we do. Case and point. If you have someone who wants to talk to you about some theological hobby horse (end times, the Nephalim, Mechizadek, age of the earth, etc) do you think their goal is to help you or to win an argument that proves they are right? Often the latter. The lack of humility that often comes with speculation should be our first red flag that things have gone off track. 

And because speculation holds something other than the gospel closest to our heart, we begin to look down on other people who don’t speculate the way we do. Remember, in Ephesus, people are adding to the gospel. They are creating new systems like not marrying or not eating certain things that make you a better Christian. Well, the gospel says that there is no such thing as a better Christian. More or less sanctified, sure, but not a better Christian with any greater value or status. You are either a Christian repentant of your sins turning to Jesus for your righteousness or you are not. So when we add things to the gospel that create some layered cast system of Christians, we are compromising the message of the gospel. 

Churches do this by adding parenting styles to the gospel or schooling styles to the gospel. It’s not a coincidence that we do this most often with our approach to children because that is where we are most tempted to find our self-righteousness. But we also do it in other ways. Some churches do it with whether you drink alcohol or not. Whether you speak in tongues or not. When Angela went back to school, I had someone pull me aside and tell me that a woman’s place was not in the workforce. And the way that conversation happened, I felt like he was setting me up as a lesser Christian because I didn’t add what he added to the gospel. 

When speculation runs rampant, it gives birth to a hermeneutic of suspicion. That’s a fancy phrase. Let me explain. I said this a couple years ago, but my kids for some years have been convinced that anyone who drives a white van is a criminal. Kidnapper at best, murderer at worst. And we were driving down 436 one day and we passed a van that was a service to bring special needs people from one part of the city to another. And my daughter said, “See! It literally says ‘we will take you’ on the side of the van!” Taking that attitude to the Bible or the church leads to the hermeneutic of suspicion. It’s always looking for something bad in someone else whether it’s there or not and not needing evidence to feel like you are correct. 

That’s what speculation gives rise to. That’s why speculation divides a church. A church is to be grounded in and united in what we know to be most true and important. We should be known more for what we are for rather than what we are against. And nothing is both more true and more important than the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel is not just head knowledge, but something that changes our hearts and our eternities. And that brings us to the last point. 

1. Strive for the goal of the gospel message

The gospel message brings us into the household of God and it then, by the power of the Holy Spirit, makes us a loving household. This is verse 5:  5 The aim of our charge is love lthat issues from a pure heart and ma good conscience andna sincere faith. - 1 Tim 1:5 The main goal is love. Love makes a healthy home. Love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. Paul is drawing from Jesus here. Do you remember in Matthew 22 when a lawyer ask Jesus 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, g“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And ha second is like it: iYou shall love your neighbor as yourself. - Matt 22:36-39

Love is the goal. Love for God and love for each other, but that only happens when we are given a new heart. And we can only be given a new heart of love by the One who first loved us. Jesus' love is the only way to a pure heart. Listen to what Jesus said in John 15. 12 p“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.13 qGreater love has no one than this, rthat someone lay down his life for his friends. - John 15:13 He’s connecting our love with each other to his love for us. Paul does the same thing in Ephesians 5.  25 gHusbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and hgave himself up for her, - Eph 5:25 

When we repent of our sins and turn to Jesus as our only hope, he resides inside of us in the form of the Holy Spirit giving us new desires. A pure heart doesn’t mean we are perfect, it means that we have a foundational desire to honor God with what we do. A non-Christian can live a more moral life than a Christian, but not have a more pure heart. If they do not believe that Jesus has accomplished everything necessary for our salvation, then why are they doing those good works? Maybe they think that’s how God will accept them. Maybe they think that’s what makes them better than other people. Maybe that’s where they find their joy and satisfaction. Well, that makes those good works self-righteous works. The Christian does good works to honor God who has already saved them. Again, we are going to fail, but the Christian will know we failed, thank God for the grace of Jesus, and try to do better in the future for God’s glory and the satisfaction we have in him. That’s a pure heart. 

A good conscience means that we know when we go to meet God after we die, he will look at us as if we have never sinned because all the good works of Jesus have been accrued to our spiritual account and all the bad works we have done were punished on the cross. We don’t have to dwell in our sin or lose sleep because our debt was paid by Jesus forever as he took God’s wrath in our place on the cross. 

And a sincere faith is one that is devoted to Jesus as he is handed down to us from Paul and others. We are focused on what is most true and most important. A people who take seriously the Scriptures and the church we are called and baptized into. And when you put a community of people together who have a pure heart, who have a pure conscience, and who have a sincere faith, you get a people who love each other which is the goal of the gospel message. We aren’t saved by our love for each other, we are saved by the love of God and then called to display that love to others. 

I saw this viral video not long ago that really made me sad. It was a family of four at a basketball game and it was that part of the game where the camera was putting fans on the big screen. Well, the camera was on this family, but the mom, dad, and youngest kid were all on devices and the 6 year old was the only one waving to the big screen. I mean, the whole point in going to the game was to be together. They were physically together, but not really together. And the same thing can happen in the church. We can be in the same room on Sunday, but not really together. 

The church is designed to be a family. A family who knows each other, cares about each other, and is physically, relationally, emotionally, and spiritually together. The gospel of Jesus Christ brings us not only into a new kingdom, but a new family. A new household. 

So for some of you, that means joining a community group, for some that means trying to eat lunch with other people after worship, for others it means registering for Discover OGC May 5th to see what it looks like to join this church family, for others it means serving. There are so many ways to plug into this church family. You don’t have to do everything, but in our busy lives, it probably does mean that we have to adjust some of our rhythms and priorities. But that’s what a family does. 

And our hope is that all who desire to live in the church family God has designed for our flourishing can find that church family here.